The Stablecoins Are Replacing Traditional Treasury Systems in Global Corporates

Arnoud: I think it's one of the most promising money movement innovations in decades. I think the big change that we've seen is that the regulators have actually classified stablecoins as funds, so you can treat them as money, and that's why you see corporates accelerating adoption of stablecoins as one of the new tools in the treasury toolkit.

Jan-Willem: How accessible are these money market funds on the blockchain for the corporates?

Arnoud: Getting better and better, but...

Jan-Willem: Arnoud Star Busmann is the CEO of Quantoz, a regulated stablecoin issuer based in the Netherlands, and a partner at the T3i Partner Network. He works at the intersection of digital assets, fintech, and global payment infrastructure.

Arnoud: Everything that you would want, you get. Therefore, it's a far superior settlement tool. Moving from just in case to just in time is going to be the big shift.

Jan-Willem: Where do you see stablecoins as a payment methodology in a few years' time, and what would be the role you foresee in corporate treasury operations?

Arnoud: I see it as the...

Jan-Willem: Welcome, Arnoud. Stablecoins have always been a topic which was mainly interesting for retail investors who are active in the crypto community. Lately they have been making headlines among corporate treasurers as well. Arnoud, how should corporate treasurers nowadays think about stablecoins?

Arnoud: I think it's a fascinating tool. I think it's one of the most promising money movement innovations in probably decades. It has nothing to do with crypto — at least, that's not the way I look at it. It's a very disruptive ingredient for the treasury toolkit, particularly because settlement completes so quickly, also cross-border, with finality and almost for free. It really cuts down on many of the traditional costs and the complexity of settlement. So it's a highly disruptive, highly useful, valuable ingredient in the treasury toolkit.

Jan-Willem: All right. And how should corporate treasurers think of the underlying mechanics of stablecoins? Because I've been active and using stablecoins for many, many years, and I've seen many different forms of stablecoins coming along, some not so successful. But corporate treasurers might have also heard of CBDCs. What exactly distinguishes a stablecoin from these other forms of stablecoin-like coins?

Arnoud: I think some of the boundaries are blurring, but if I look at, let's say, algorithmic stablecoins, I don't think we need to talk about them. They derive their value from something external — it could be commodities or secondary markets. If we're talking about money, then there are indeed multiple forms: the CBDC you hear about, tokenized deposits, and stablecoins. There are multiple forms of CBDC as well, but it's really about money creation. So if you as a central bank issue a CBDC, you're actually creating money. It's also a monetary act rather than a technology act. If I'm talking about tokenized deposits, it's money that has already been issued. It lives in the bank account — as far as you can call it issued — and it's tokenized. So it's another way of using money to pay, but it's very much in a closed loop. Only somebody that has an account with the same bank, if a bank is the issuer, can actually exchange that token money back for fiat in the bank account. So it's limited in utility. Stablecoins are interesting because they can actually do multiple things. They are backed by real money — money that is sitting in multiple banks or in safe assets like highly liquid financial instruments, for instance money markets. They should always have a one-on-one backing, and if they're regulated, there are very strict audit rules to make sure that they are indeed backed. And what's interesting about stablecoins is that they can derive their value in two ways. One of them is: I should always be able to go back to the issuer and get one-for-one fiat money. Or I can trade them in secondary markets, which tokenized deposits can't. Those secondary markets make me less dependent on the issuer, but there are some potential market price fluctuations. So a euro stablecoin might be 0.9999 or 1.01 instead of just exactly one. For the interest of treasurers, I think the focus should really be on these regulated stablecoins, because that's where the value is.

Jan-Willem: Yeah. So if I understand correctly, for every stablecoin I have, I can redeem it for a real dollar or euro directly at the issuer of the stablecoin. But in practice that is almost never done, because you can also just trade them on secondary markets, or just send them, use them, or keep them. So the redemption mechanism is not often used. Should I see it like that?

Arnoud: Not yet. Traditionally, you indeed go to a secondary market like a crypto exchange or an OTC broker and you do the exchange there. I expect, as this is being used more and more in corporate treasuries and real-world use cases, that it's going to become more important for treasurers and corporates to have direct relationships with the issuer, because it basically reduces redemption risk. It reduces dependency on the market. But quite importantly, if you can redeem with the issuer instantly, then it's not unlikely that your auditor will let you book stablecoin holdings as cash equivalents on the balance sheet, which then removes the need for that redemption and removes a lot of friction from treasury operations. So I think that direct relationship with the issuer is going to become much more important, and issuers are setting themselves up to make that possible.

Jan-Willem: All right. And when you think of stablecoins, I think there are quite some misconceptions among treasury teams. As we discussed a few minutes ago, they are traditionally seen as cryptocurrencies. What has changed over the last couple of years — what is now changing — so that treasury teams are becoming more and more interested in the actual use cases underlying these stablecoins? Because if I look at my LinkedIn, I see a lot of headlines nowadays about stablecoins revolutionizing payments, and all kinds of other headlines. What is now slowly changing so that stablecoins become more popular?

Arnoud: Yeah, it's an issue — I have the same problem with my LinkedIn profile. The algorithm is really polluted with stablecoin content: sometimes hype, and sometimes very interesting, relevant information. I think the big change that we've seen is that the regulators, like the ECB, have actually classified stablecoins in the EU — as long as they follow certain rules — as funds. So you can treat them as funds, as money, and that makes it legal tender to purchase goods and services. It gives it a value. It gives you redemption rights, so it links it directly to the underlying money that's been issued. So it gives it a legal status. It also removes a lot of the risk — not just the redemption risk, but also the reputation risk and the regulatory risk. I think that's been the big transformation, and that's why you see corporates accelerating adoption of stablecoins as one of the new tools in the treasury toolkit. The big difference with crypto assets is that crypto assets are usually backed by nothing — they're backed by belief, or maybe utility in a specific business model. But to get your money back, you are completely dependent on secondary markets, and we've seen that the value can go from one to zero very quickly. So I think stablecoins are now as far from crypto as money is from shares in early-stage VC-backed companies, for instance. It's really a big chasm that's been created, and it's a chasm between the real world and the crypto markets, which is where a lot of the excitement comes from.

Jan-Willem: All right. And you have joined Quantoz, which is a stablecoin issuing company, as CEO. What made you end up joining a stablecoin company? Because looking at your background, you have worked at banks and technology companies. Why did you decide to make this shift towards becoming the CEO of a stablecoin issuing company?

Arnoud: I think it's been a natural progression of the things that I've been doing in the past. I've always loved innovation, I love building companies, I love startups. I spent quite a lot of time learning how — not stablecoins, but blockchains — can really change the way market actors exchange value. Sometimes that value is information, sometimes it's money. I spent quite a lot of time with ING Bank, particularly in their commodity business, looking at how we could digitize the underlying paperwork associated with shipping oil or soybeans or other commodities. There are a lot of parties involved in, let's say, shipping oil from Uganda to China, for instance, and there's a lot of information being processed. A lot of the risk in that shipment, particularly financing it, is associated with having a good grip on the collateral, and that relies on very good information. Using blockchain technology helped us to get very confident about the information that's being used, which makes it possible to settle contracts very quickly, also on the physical side. Now, if you can do the paperwork really quickly, then the next step is: okay, well, let's get paid instantly as well. And this is where it breaks down. We saw that paying via the regular banking system can still take many days, particularly as a lot of commodities come out of what we call the global south, with banks quite far from the Fed in New York. So the correspondent banking network wasn't really set up to meet that delivery-versus-payment objective that is so attractive, where you want to close the gap between the two. I also ran a company in Canada for a while, focused on mining and metals, and ran into the same problem: great at digitizing the information of the physical leg of a trade, but not the financial leg. I started looking at what we could do there, particularly tokenizing some of the debt instruments like commodity trade finance, and I also started looking at stablecoins as the real game changer. Around that time, someone introduced me to this company called Quantoz. I went for a coffee, learned about what they were doing, learned how they got a license from the Dutch central bank — which is a tough regulator — to issue electronic money on a public blockchain, very innovative. I went back for a couple more coffees, and they asked me to become CEO, and I actually didn't have any good reason to say no. So I took on that role, and here we are.

Jan-Willem: Well, that's a nice evolution. And if I hear you correctly, the payment in stablecoins can often go hand in hand with a much broader form of doing things on a blockchain, on a shared ledger. Can you elaborate on some of the use cases? For example, you mentioned digitization of the whole payment process across a certain supply chain. How would that work in practice? Can you give an example from companies you worked with in the field? Because I think it's not only the payment you're talking about, but also the processes surrounding that — when would a company get paid?

Arnoud: Yeah, I think that's really important. So particularly in supply chains, settlement is a key point, because at that moment the settlement has two legs: you need to exchange the physical goods, or potentially a service, for payment, and any gap between the two opens up risk. Mitigating the risk of that gap between delivery and payment can be very expensive, because there's FX involved, where FX rates can change. There's a settlement risk: is the money actually going to arrive? There's a credit risk as well: are they going to pay? Can they pay? All these things need mitigation, and the bigger the gap between the moment of delivery and the moment of payment, the more that risk mitigation costs. So if you look at supply chains that operate on the basis of payment first rather than a letter of credit, a coffee producer is not going to hand over control of the coffee until they've got money sitting in the bank, and that money takes time to arrive. If the money takes a number of days, or sometimes weeks — as can happen when it's a settlement via the correspondent network to emerging markets — that means the goods are not supplied, which consumes a lot of working capital for everybody, requires hedging against all kinds of market risk, and slows down supply chains. So if you can move money instantly with settlement finality, and it's there in one second, the goods can be released. Things speed up, and you extinguish a lot of the risk associated with delayed settlement. With those risks, a lot of the costs go as well, and those costs have multiple facets. So being able to move to atomic delivery versus payment is a great mission. And it's not just in physical supply chains — you can also see it in financial markets, particularly, for instance, in money market funds or other investment products that still operate at T+1 or T+2 settlement. If you have surplus excess cash on your balance sheet and you want to put it to work in a yielding instrument, you need to be sure that you don't need that money for at least a number of days, because it will take some time to get in there, and then it will take some time to get out of there. But if it can move instantly, and the administration of the instrument is also on the blockchain, you can do the exchange in a smart contract and there are no manual operations. The entire administration is automated, the records are perfect, and you are not exposed to any delays. That makes it possible to really start putting your money — your cash buffers — to work all the time, knowing that you can take it out five minutes before you need it without any further delays. And particularly because you can verify the settlement finality on the blockchain: it's gone from this address to your address, and it's done. There's no reversal possible. There's none of this "we've given you the message that the money has arrived, but you can't use it yet because it may still be held up somewhere or withdrawn." That risk is gone.

That was a long answer to a short question, but I hope it answers it.

Jan-Willem: Well, it's actually a very interesting topic. How accessible are these money market funds, tokenized on a blockchain, for the corporates? I have been playing around in decentralized finance myself, where it's very easy to deposit stablecoins in a decentralized finance protocol and get a better yield on your cash as compared to a savings account. But how accessible is this for corporate treasury teams? I can imagine that they probably want to not act on a decentralized finance protocol, but rather with a counterparty that they trust and that gives them a digitized money market fund or something similar. How accessible are these new forms of yield optimization?

Arnoud: Getting better and better, but I don't think it's completely there yet. We worked with a couple of companies that are very interested in that, because you can imagine: if you need to be liquid with cash, and you need to hold quite a big cash buffer to make payments for unpredictable supply chain events, that results in a lot of cash drag. So if you can put it in a money market fund with an almost risk-free return and still be liquid, it's really a game changer with regards to cash drag and the suboptimal use of money today. So the prize is big, and it's moving quickly. I think originally, tokenized assets assumed that the game changer was in highly illiquid assets: real estate, paintings, cars and stuff like that. I think the learning from the past years has been that actually, as a token holder in an illiquid asset, you're worse off, because you don't have any control over being able to liquidate the asset and recover your money — you're completely at the mercy of the operator or manager of that asset — and you may be able to sell back your token, but probably at a discount. So it's not great; there's no secondary market for those things. What we've seen is that tokenizing assets has actually moved from tokenizing cash — stablecoins, the most basic one — to tokenizing government debt and money market funds, and that's the stage we're at now. If I look at where the industry stands: in DeFi it's already working, it's fine, but in the non-DeFi world there are a couple of different models that we're working with as well. One of them is issuers that you buy directly from, but you still have something like a T+1, because the underlying administration still tends to be cash-based. So you may be able to send a stablecoin to the counterparty, but they still need to off-ramp it into cash and send that money to the issuer before the tokenized asset comes into your wallet. That can take one day. So it's almost there, but not really, and it's not atomic — it relies on an intervention. What we're seeing now is some platforms, partners that we're working with, that actually have secondary market liquidity. They work with market makers, tokenize money market funds, list them on a secondary market, and you can move in and out instantly. So it's very close to the experience on crypto markets or other venues. I think this will be one of the first ones where we see adoption. It comes with complete custody, so you don't actually have to handle the stablecoins yourself, and it becomes an integrated experience. From money sitting in a bank account or in an e-money account, you mint it into a stablecoin — or you're not even involved as a user — and it goes into a wallet with a custodian. The custodian is also the market maker; they will do the swap with the money market fund, and that way you get exposure without any of the operational hassle. So I see that one working. I also know that some funds — some issuers, particularly the American ones — are starting to issue inventory on chain, and with your stablecoin you can go there and buy from that tokenized inventory, which gives you the same rights, and then it can move very close to that atomic delivery versus payment. So I think that's the next one. It's probably going to be Q4, I think, when we see the first ones of those really becoming operational. The secondary markets, probably Q2 — well, I know that because we're very close to getting that working.

Jan-Willem: All right. So the market makers have quite an important role in making all these benefits come to fruition — for example, by allowing you to quickly convert your tokenized money market fund back to stablecoins, which traditionally, even if you do it on chain, still requires a couple of days. But the market makers are jumping into this gap and providing liquidity to offer basically an instant conversion mechanism to get your liquidity back.

Arnoud: And that liquidity can be quite expensive. So let's see if that's sustainable, because if you need to pay a couple of basis points to the market maker for the redemption of the money market fund, that may just kill the benefit you get from the yield, particularly if you're talking about euro bonds. So I think ultimately, having that direct path to the issuer is going to be a very important one, and having that on-chain inventory that you can tap into — but then you've got all the KYC and all those other things that you need to deal with. So I guess the message is: it's emerging, but it's not completely there yet. But I see tokenized yield, next to stablecoins, as one of the top three new tools that the treasury toolkit should start looking at and adopting.

Jan-Willem: All right. Yeah, that sounds like a logical one indeed. And coming back to that: I've talked to quite some treasury teams over the last year which were specifically interested in stablecoins, but it was more to learn what it can mean for their company in the longer run.

What do you typically notice when you talk to a team? Is it more that they reach out to you driven by an interest in innovation, or do they have an actual use case that they're looking to solve with stablecoins?

Arnoud: A combination of both. I think you see some sectors are faster, further advanced in the adoption cycle. If I think of treasurers that work, for instance, in globally operating PSPs, merchant acquirers — there are marketplaces, platforms, particularly ones that have cross-border operations — it's already there. They're already asking which ones they should use and what the relative costs are, and they potentially switch between parties as well. So I think that's maturing quickly. Then I see it in trade finance funds and trade finance platforms — we work with a couple. The potential benefit is very high, you can see that you can scale, and I think the complexity of stablecoins can be abstracted from the end users, which are the corporates. There are a couple of corporates that are coming to us because they want to do collections in Europe. They're exporters from Southeast Asia, for instance, with customers in the EU, and they want to do collections from those customers. But they don't have an EU bank account, and it's just friction, and it's relatively expensive to do a SWIFT payment for a transaction that's, let's say, even 10 or 20,000. A significant part of the margin goes to the payment network. So they see a way to not just streamline the collection, but also accelerate the payout to them. Rather than waiting for a couple of days, aggregating funds and then doing the payout, they can continuously stream the proceeds, which helps them with their treasury, removes all the risk that we spoke about, and they can off-ramp into liquidity pools at the destination. That is already happening as well. And I see the adoption more in themes, in competitive environments where the cost of settlement and the cost of liquidity is actually a significant part of working capital and potentially of the expenses that they have, and I think that's where the growth will come fast. The large corporate groups, I think, are looking at it, but I think it will take some more experimentation before that happens.

Jan-Willem: And would you also say it matters — are the benefits of doing cross-border payments bigger for specific countries? For example, suppose I'm a company from the Netherlands or Europe and I want to make a payment to a specific country. I can imagine that the traditional banking payment rails are more efficient for some countries, but for some other geographies across the world the benefits might be even bigger to move to stablecoin payments. Do you see specific countries that stand out, or payment flows that stand out, that give the biggest benefit if they are brought on chain?

Arnoud: Oh, for sure. The further away you are from the Fed in New York, the longer it takes, and it's not just the number of hops in the correspondent network. It's also access to the correspondent network. It's access to foreign currency, because ultimately there needs to be a swap to a local currency, and you need to have enough of the foreign currency to be able to facilitate that. And those markets may not be very liquid; you may need to wait some time for sufficient liquidity. So for sure, the further away from the Fed, the longer it takes, the more friction, and the more expensive it is. And I think that also kills the commercial viability of many business models. If you need to first aggregate a whole pile of transactions to offset the cost of the settlement, it's expensive. So yeah, if you need to pay someone in New York and you're based in the Netherlands and it's a transaction of 20 or 30,000 dollars, just use SWIFT. It's way faster, it's less hassle, and the cost is manageable. So it purely depends on the settlement objectives of the treasury team. I look at it as a devil's triangle that every treasury ops team has to deal with: the speed of settlement, versus the risk of the settlement actually succeeding, versus the cost. You can optimize for one or two of them, but never all three at the same time. Depending on what your strategy is, your objective, and how you optimize, that determines the form of money and therefore the rails that you would use. And for certain payment corridors, I think the cost and the risk aspects are so high that you want to solve that with different rails, particularly if those rails at the same time remove any time delays. That's why it's so transformative.

Jan-Willem: Yeah. Got it. Okay. And how would you say — because in corporate treasury, traditionally, cash visibility is a problem. There are many different bank accounts across the world. Some banks give good options for what we call bank connectivity — the ability to get your bank statements in an automated, digital way — others not so much. How do stablecoins offer that? I can imagine a stablecoin lives on the blockchain. Is it always a public blockchain, and does this fact make it easier for corporate treasury teams to get visibility on these payment flows and balances of stablecoins?

Arnoud: Yeah, I think you've got perfect visibility. It's fully digital. It doesn't rely on any humans to provide you with that information. There are fantastic tools that help give you insight — you just click and add wallets to them. It's like a treasury management system on steroids. Across blockchains, across the world, you open up as many wallets as you want for whatever purpose. It's a fantastic way to have visibility. And the good thing about it is that money is never in transit — or not really. At worst, settlement finality takes a minute or two, if you've got, for instance, some chains that need a few blocks to settle. In the current world, you make a payment, or your client makes a payment, and then you pray and you wait for it to arrive, and you have to chase. If you're lucky, your payment provider gives you the UETR with the report from SWIFT, but otherwise you need to call your bank, and the bank needs to explain why it's taking so long. They need to do an investigation, which costs you another €100 or €200. It's just really painful. With blockchains, there's absolutely none of that. It gives certainty, it gives transparency, it gives visibility, it gives finality. Everything that you would want, you get. Therefore, it's a far superior settlement tool.

Jan-Willem: Can the visibility on these blockchains also be too good, in the sense that when I make a payment to one of my suppliers, given that the blockchain is so transparent and public, everyone can scout the blockchain and find out to whom I made the payments?

Arnoud: Yeah.

Jan-Willem: What are the privacy concerns that corporate treasury teams should be aware of?

Arnoud: I think that's an incredibly valid point. I don't think privacy has been solved that well yet on public blockchains. I'm a firm believer in public blockchains versus private blockchains, as they call it, even if it's just for access to secondary markets. But the privacy element comes with a cost in itself, and it compromises the model in a way, because the privacy solutions that are out there at the moment rely on encryption and decryption by a single party that is the custodian of the algorithm. That means that suddenly you've got somebody else deciding on whether a transaction has happened or not. And I think that breaks the ethos and the goal of having instant settlements with verifiable finality — I think that's a challenge. The other thing is: as an issuer of stablecoins, you use technology, and if I use a third party to maintain what is essentially the ledger of balances — which shows who is holding how much — then if I give it to another company, it's an outsourcing contract, and my regulator will look at me and say: how can you guarantee that you always have access? What if the vendor goes under? What if it gets sanctioned? You don't know what can happen. So if you use a public blockchain and the privacy is dependent on a third party, that means there's insufficient decentralization, which essentially means that you're outsourcing to that third party. You need to have an outsourcing contract, and that outsourcing contract needs to withstand the scrutiny of the regulator, and a lot of the solutions are not mature enough to withstand that. So that's one element. The other element is that regulators like that you as an issuer can help with enforcement actions: being able to see what's where, freeze a wallet if needed, clawbacks, those things. Tether is doing that regularly, Circle is doing that regularly, which is also not really decentralized. But that's the whole point of stablecoins: it is not decentralized — just the ledger that records the movement between wallets is decentralized. So if it's private, how are you going to do the analytics? How do you verify what the trail of a stablecoin has been — whether it's been in the wallet of a bad actor, a sanctioned actor, or not? And how do you control where that wallet or stablecoin is now? If it's private, you don't know whose it is and what's in it. So it's not just a technical complexity; it's also a governance and compliance complexity that needs to be solved. This problem has existed for a long time, also in commodity trading. Basically, parties don't want their competitors to know who they're doing business with. It's a trade secret — particularly how often, and what the value of the shipments of oil or copper is going to be, for instance. So if you settle that on a public blockchain, then anybody can verify it, which is not where you want to be, especially if values are involved. What we looked at in the past — and I think it applies here as well — is that you can do a number of things. You can spoof it with a lot of fake transactions that have no value, so it's fairly hard to determine what's real and what's not. The other one is that every time you make a payment, you create a new address and you pay from there — you mint it freshly from an internal source of money to that new address — and then maybe your counterparty does the same thing, and it's very difficult to correlate the two based on metadata. So those are ways to look at it, but I hope that the privacy and zero-knowledge-proof algorithms advance in such a way that you can actually solve those compliance and governance challenges and get sufficiently decentralized. What we look at, as an example: if you're thinking about corporate treasuries with multiple branches, and you want to do cash sweeping and pooling, move money and liquidity between the operating companies, you probably don't want to do that on the public blockchain, for a number of reasons. And we look at it this way: why don't you do that with e-money? So you put it with a classic EMI — this solution has existed for ages; some of the neo-banking apps are essentially e-money institutions, like we are. What you achieve there is that you maintain privacy, and you decouple it from the constraints of the batch-operated banking network, which has cut-off times. So you go 24/7, 365. Your settlement is instant, it's free, and it's private. Only when you pay outside of the private network of your company do you switch it to a stablecoin — potentially a new wallet address — then you make the payment and you're done. So that maintains a balance of privacy but gives you access to the benefits of public blockchains. And I see that as an interim situation until we solve the other ones, as we discussed.

Jan-Willem: Yeah. So you can create basically a hybrid setup where you do part of the transactions on a more private network, and then when you need to make an external payment, the settlement is on a public blockchain, for example.

Arnoud: And in general — I come back to that devil's triangle from earlier — it's about your settlement objectives: what do you want to achieve? Currently you only have one way to do it, which is the correspondent network, and maybe you hold buffers locally just to do a faster payout. But now there are options. So any settlement strategy, for a particular transaction, needs to look at what form of money is most appropriate, and then which rails to use for that form of money. If speed is not the most important thing, but cost is, just use SWIFT and do it that way — it can potentially be cheaper if you don't want the operational setup. If you want to do settlement within your company — or, let's say, you've got close suppliers and customers you frequently trade with and frequently pay back and forth, or employees — just use e-money: it's faster, better, and sometimes cheaper, I think. And only when it's cross-border, when it goes outside the company, when it crosses real-time payment networks, when there's FX involved — then really look at using stablecoins for this, because I think it's a much superior way to achieve this objective. So it's about making that call. In a way it complicates the decision-making, but on the other hand it gives optionality that is truly transformative for cash management in companies.

Jan-Willem: Yeah, it for sure gives a lot of options. Can you maybe explain what would be the benefit for a company of implementing a cash pooling structure with stablecoins or e-money, versus doing it as a physical cash pooling structure with their bank?

Arnoud: I think if you do it with a bank, then quite often the bank also asks you to centralize all your accounts with that particular bank and that banking network, which may not always work, because the bank may not have representation in all the jurisdictions that you operate in. So you become multi-banked if you're of a certain size or a certain footprint — which means double cost, double compliance. You need to keep an eye on the tax implications of moving between banks, and potential regulatory delays. Even within SEPA, if you move money from one country to another and it's more than 200,000 euros, odds are high that it's going to arrive the next day, not the same day. So it's not instant, and that gets worse and worse. So if you want to do really fast movements of your treasury positions within the operating companies, doing that via the banking network is expensive and will cause friction and delays. If you lift it to an e-money level, you can do it 24/7, 365. It's free and there's zero friction. And it's fully digital, which means you're again not relying on bank personnel being available, or banking processes breaking down, or other things. Liquidity can move continuously, predictably, and reliably, and you off-ramp — redeem — in the location where you want to redeem it. If you have bank accounts in multiple jurisdictions, you can consolidate. You off-ramp at the last minute, and then you're exactly where you need to be, and that's it. I think that's a superior way. It makes it programmable. You can automate your cash sweeping and pooling. You don't have thousands of instructions. You don't have to deal with 500 banking portals, remember the passwords, sign up all the users. If you're multi-banked across multiple jurisdictions, I think there's a lot of friction just in the setup.

Jan-Willem: Yeah, I think it's also quite paper-intensive. Just making a change to how this pooling structure should work requires you to sign documents and wait a few days before it's implemented. So I can see the value of digitizing that part. So you're creating a meta layer above the banks which is independent from the banks, so there's less lock-in, and intuitively it makes more sense to me to do it that way. And how do corporate treasury teams usually deal with this? Because they are very aware of different risks, and one of their jobs is to manage risk, and stablecoins of course introduce a form of counterparty risk, because you're relying on the issuer of the stablecoin if you ever want to redeem it. You're also relying on them to maintain the backing, in a way, and to keep the amount on their bank accounts, or in cash or cash equivalents on their balance sheet, so that you can indeed redeem these stablecoins. Do companies tend to hold these stablecoins for a while, or do they usually redeem and convert them to fiat money immediately after receiving them? How do you see that working in practice with companies?

Arnoud: I think it depends a bit on the size of the company, to be honest, and on the mandate of the CFO and the treasury team — possibly also, I wouldn't say the age of the CFO, but definitely how familiar the company is with new technologies like blockchains and others. If the CFO is a crypto-native dude or girl who trades crypto and is completely familiar with various blockchains, that's a different discussion. Still, for the larger companies, I think it's very hard to explain to anyone, if something goes wrong, that you were taking operational risk or counterparty risk that you didn't fully understand. So I think it's very important to be comfortable with that. This is also where, if you start looking at stablecoins, you're effectively opening a bank account with a new counterparty, because you're taking a risk on that party: am I going to get my money back? So what are your redemption options? You look at redeemability and liquidity. Liquidity comes from the position in secondary markets: how many exchanges are there, are there OTC brokers, et cetera, where I know I can exchange this? And what is the peg — how much liquidity is there? On some exchanges the peg is wide open, and that makes it very difficult to use, because it becomes more of an investment than cash. Only two stablecoins in the world, I would say, have sufficient liquidity globally that you could argue the peg is so tight — the spreads are so tight — that you could look at them as equivalent. That's USDT from Tether, and Circle. Tether is by far the biggest. They operate outside the EU — it's not authorized in the EU — but it's the first one, the biggest one, and it has traditionally had a lot of trust from its users that they can always redeem it for cash because of the secondary market. In the global south — I think the latest statistic was something like 400 million people — people are holding USDT as a store of value because they trust that it can be exchanged. I think that's difficult for corporates; this is a retail story. For corporates, I would look at what I mentioned earlier: redeemability. Who is the issuer, and can I get to the issuer? And then: how can I make sure that the issuer behaves in accordance with the regulation, that the money is still there, and where the money is stored — in which form, at which bank? If I look at MiCA, the regulation in Europe, the fundamental requirement for currency-backed stablecoins is that you need to maintain at least 30% of the reserves backing the stablecoin in cash with credit institutions that have a registration in the EU. Now, you can spread that across multiple credit institutions, and that makes it actually quite safe for that cash portion — arguably safer than having all your money sitting with one bank. So in a way, you're reducing counterparty risk there by adopting the stablecoin. A maximum of 70% can be invested in yield-bearing instruments, but that has also been tied down massively. It can only be in highly liquid financial instruments with minimal market risk or concentration risk — meaning that you can't just put it with one issuer of money market funds, because that's concentration risk. You need to be careful if you're doing it with one small EU government issue or tap: there might not be a liquid secondary market in that debt, so you need to be confident that there's no haircut on the debt if you need to liquidate quickly. So that's what the rules say. Then the reserves need to be such that — at least, that's the way we look at it — let's say we have all our stablecoins out there, they're backed, but for some reason our company goes into default. You can bet that there's going to be a bank run on the stablecoins that we issue: everybody wants to get their money out. So, also by law, we have segregated the customer funds — the funds backing the stablecoins — completely from the company assets. You need to have a segregated structure, so that in the event of a liquidation, the liquidators can basically ensure everybody gets their money back. That structure is audited, and of course it's part of the regulatory compliance.

Jan-Willem: So the worst that can actually happen is that you have to wait a little bit longer when redeeming, if there is this bank run which you talked about. 30% is instantaneously redeemable, because it's held in cash at the issuer, and the other 70% is invested in short-term investments, but there might be some delay in when you can redeem it, in the worst-case scenario. Is that how I should look at it?

Arnoud: Yes. And the investment is only in government debt in the same currency as the one you're issuing. So we would invest only in AAA bonds from the Dutch and the German government, and for our US dollar we back it with US Treasuries. That's exactly it, and we designed it in such a way that we can liquidate our entire reserve within five days.

Jan-Willem: Okay.

Arnoud: So five days waiting time, plus some admin time. I think that's important. Now, the other thing: that's the rules, that's one thing. To be compliant with the regulation, you need to have a license first of all, and then you need to state that you are compliant. But then it comes down to: anybody can say anything, so how is that being verified? It needs to be audited. There need to be regular proofs, attestations of your compliance. It also comes down to the regulator: how strict is the regulator, and how confident was the regulator, when they gave you the license, that you are sufficiently well set up to be able to professionally administer this instrument? Meaning you need to have segregation of duties, you need to have your AML and your counter-terrorism financing procedures well in place, and that's all checked. You need to evidence it; there are audits, all those things. So the quality of the regulator becomes an important part of the confidence that a user can have in your level of compliance with the regulation. The regulation should give you the confidence that you can redeem, but the regulator should give you the confidence that the issuer is actually playing by the rules. The next thing is the cash component: where are you putting that? If you're putting that with a small bank somewhere, and it's a significant part of the balance sheet of the bank, that's a concentration risk in the bank that you should not be taking. If your bank has a triple-B rating, for instance, maybe that's not a great place to put it — maybe that's not sufficiently robust to give confidence. So as a corporate treasurer, if you normally bank with A-plus rated banks as a minimum requirement, and your shareholders require you to do that, you don't really want to use a stablecoin whose reserves are in a triple-B bank, because you would be in breach of your duties. So then your universe of issuers gets narrowed to certain jurisdictions from a regulatory perspective, and the reserves also need to be with credit institutions that meet the rating requirements of your shareholders and the market. And that makes the universe of potential issuers quite small, actually. It doesn't play in all sectors, but in some sectors — particularly if you're talking large amounts, and corporate treasurers that are not hired to take risks with the company cash — I think it's a key consideration.

Jan-Willem: Okay. So this regulation is quite important, because it signals the quality of the stablecoin issuers. If you look at risks for corporates specifically, what other types of risk are quite important? I can imagine that if you hold assets on a blockchain, the operational processes are quite important. Who can manage a wallet? Is there a separation of duties, a four-eyes principle, those kinds of things? Do you see companies struggling with setting that up, or is it as easy as setting up a bank payment environment, where you just say: okay, this person is allowed to enter the payment, this person can sign it? Is that infrastructure already built for stablecoins as well, and how are companies typically experiencing getting onboarded to this type of payment?

Arnoud: I think the tools are there now to facilitate that, absolutely. You've got two types of wallets. You've got self-custody, where you're responsible for your keys, essentially, and access, and you've got custodied wallets, where you rely on a third party, almost like a bank, to make sure that the operational complexity and operational risk is taken care of. So if you lose your key, you can always call the help desk, they give you a new user and a new password, and you've got access again. You see the two worlds really merging, where the self-custody user experience becomes much more like a custody wallet, and the tools related to signing are there — and, I think, ultimately more flexible as well: you can do way more configurations in terms of who needs to sign for what. I think that one is largely solved; the technology and the vendors are there to provide account solutions to do that. And I think stablecoins are an interesting angle here — there's, in a way, a benefit that stablecoins have, which comes with the regulatory compliance, that crypto assets don't have. If you transfer, let's say, a bitcoin from one address to another, it's completely done. Whereas if you transfer a stablecoin from one party to another and you lose your private key, but you know the wallet — and here I'm really swearing in the church of decentralization and crypto ethos — the stablecoin issuer can actually help. Because you're already trusting a centralized counterparty with the money, so let's take that into account: the stablecoin issuer can actually freeze the transaction that has been done, burn the tokens, and issue new ones, because the actual money is still sitting safely in the bank. Nothing has changed. The value hasn't gone, the value hasn't moved. It's just that — almost like a warehouse receipt for the money — the receipt has moved and you made a mistake. So you just scrap the receipt, issue it again, and there you go. And I think that should give comfort to users: yes, there's operational risk that you need to get your head around, but ultimately there are also fallbacks that you don't have with pure crypto assets.

Jan-Willem: Yeah. And how is this used in practice by these stablecoin issuers? I can imagine that the ability they have to freeze your funds at any moment feels quite scary to some, even though a bank could theoretically do that as well. But how is this typically used in practice? When does this occur? Is it only in case of theft or fraud?

Arnoud: Mainly — the published cases are for that — but it's also used for the case of a lost key. These days, if you use the appropriate tools, you have an address book. So I would not be transferring my stablecoin to a 16-digit key address; I would transfer it to Jan-Willem, because I've already whitelisted your key and address, so I know exactly where to send it and there's no typo — you select from a drop-down list.

Jan-Willem: But it's usually used in law enforcement cases, correct? Where regulators or law enforcement agencies request issuers to freeze or claw back certain funds.

Arnoud: Now, that one is an interesting one, because it can be quite arbitrary. So for us, the way we look at it is: yes, we are able to do it, and if it's a request with the appropriate authorization, we will comply. But if it's a request from an enforcement agency that is fishing, or that doesn't have the required authorization from a judge, then we will not necessarily comply. It's not for fishing. It's not for facilitating access for enforcement agencies that we like and refusing it for ones that we don't like. It needs to be very strict, and it needs to be for a legitimate reason, accompanied by evidence.

Jan-Willem: Yeah, that makes sense. And that maybe also gives some peace of mind, because I think that operational risk is quite real indeed. With a blockchain transaction, by definition, you can make it to the wrong address. With a bank, you can still probably stop it or recover it at some point, but in essence, stablecoin companies have that ability as well.

Arnoud: And I think, also to that point — and this is probably a risk, an AML risk, that corporates should be aware of as well — if you get paid in stablecoins by parties, you need to do that via venues that have a legal and regulatory obligation to verify the origin and the provenance of that stablecoin. Because the risk is: you get paid by your client, you have it in your wallet, but somewhere in the trail, three or four steps before that client, there was an actor from a sanctioned country, a sanctioned wallet. Now the authorities may request the issuer to freeze the money that's currently sitting in your wallet. So suddenly you think you've got a balance, but you can't access it. So you need to be confident about where the money comes from, which means you work with the right parties. The way we try to solve that is that, particularly for corporates, we only issue fresh money. If the balances are held with us, we will mint the stablecoin on the spot. So it's always clean and fresh — we've done our homework. It's a new coin, so there's no history either, and you can trust that it's not going to be seized in any enforcement action.

Jan-Willem: Yeah. I was thinking from the corporate perspective. Suppose companies do not immediately redeem, and at some point the stablecoins remain in circulation for a longer time and are circulated multiple times. I think when it's a known supply chain that you're dealing with when it comes to payments, the risk is probably not that big. But when you're a retailer selling stuff online and offering the option to get paid in stablecoins, you can have new buyers whom you do not know. And there I can see the risk is bigger that you're accepting a payment, and later it turns out that the funds were stolen, or the stablecoins are stolen.

Arnoud: It's like in the real world. You might be taking paper cash, and you have your till with the serial numbers in it, and at some point somebody says: hey, your serial numbers are part of a list of fake bills, fake cash, or they have been in this particular bank heist, therefore you need to hand them in. It's exactly the same thing.

And the good thing about blockchains, I think, is that because it's digital, there are good tools to do that verification. They check it against all kinds of databases — millions of wallets have been sanctioned and flagged. There are good tools to track every single movement. Using stablecoins is one of the dumbest ways for criminals and fraudsters to move money, because it's so visible and traceable. So I think the risk that you get stuck with something with a nefarious origin is lower than with physical cash.

Jan-Willem: Yeah, I do agree with you. Well, always interesting to think about, because we're at a moment in time where a lot is happening when it comes to technology — not only payments technology, but also surrounding technologies such as AI. We see a lot of different agents, even fully autonomous agents, appearing. The technology is here. There is a lot of talk about agents at some point transacting more and more by themselves. So they get their own payment tools, and of course, for an agent it would be very hard to do a KYC and open a bank account. How do you see this evolving in the future when it comes to agents holding stablecoins and transacting with them to buy goods and services autonomously? I can imagine that, if you really think of it, this can be quite a big growth opportunity for stablecoin usage.

Arnoud: Oh, absolutely. For agents, because it's all digital, the only way to pay is indeed with stablecoins or with a credit card number. You see Visa and Mastercard and the agencies already playing into that one big time. But yeah, there are a number of challenges with it, and there are a couple of companies that we work with that are experimenting in that field, with agents that are transacting, and it's quite inspiring. You might think that stablecoins operate in a lawless world where anybody can move money to anyone, and I think that is true — those are conscious decisions. But if it's an agent that is holding your money and goes out shopping, it suddenly becomes very important that the shopping only happens with trusted other agents or trusted sites. And that requires almost programmable money, which you see emerging in certain use cases as well — what they call purpose-bound money, where you can program what the money can be spent on and with whom. So you've got these lists, and you get protocols that expose the credentials, and then the agent can decide whether those credentials fit their mandate. So you'll see this whole register — currently it's five-star ratings for hotels and restaurants that you check on Tripadvisor or others; you'll start getting that for agent merchants and services as well, except that it becomes way more important, because it needs to be very objective. You and I would go through the reviews on Tripadvisor and say: well, that's fake, that's fake, no, that one makes sense. But agents are going to say: oh, five stars — fits the mandate, done. So it becomes very important that those criteria are measured and accredited independently. That's one thing. The other thing comes back to liquidity management: the beauty of stablecoins is that because money moves so fast, you don't have to have big buffers. You can have your money working in the money market funds we talked about, and only take it out piecemeal, five minutes before you need it. Now, with agents: let's say you've got 10,000 agents running around, and you're giving them a wallet with a hundred euros each. That's 1 million euros in exposure and liquidity — idle money that's doing nothing, sitting there with agents that are running around doing god knows what. And apart from the working capital that's being locked up, I'm not sure whether that's desirable. So the speed with which you can replenish those wallets of agents, and the cost of doing that — if it costs a thousandth of a percent to add half a cent to an agent wallet, and it takes only one second, maybe that's a better way to manage your exposure as well. So it comes back again to: how much do the rails cost, and how fast can you do it? The amount of liquidity that you're financing, sitting with agents, is also one of the big pain points. So yeah, it's a fascinating new topic, and there are some really cool experiments happening, but personally, I wouldn't necessarily give my bank account details and passcards to an agent just yet.

Jan-Willem: Yeah. Where do you see stablecoins as a payment methodology in a few years' time, and what would be the role you foresee in corporate treasury operations?

Arnoud: I see it as the biggest opportunity to reduce a number of cost factors, and I'm not even sure whether, in a couple of years, corporate treasury should actually use stablecoins in their raw form — going into a wallet and moving it around and stuff like that. I think it's a tool the complexity of which is abstracted away. But I think it will always have to do something with payments, or with being able to access yield products with instant liquidity. Ultimately, the goal, as we look at it, is that money is always working. It's either accruing yield or being productive, and if it's not, it's in transit towards a supplier, or you're receiving it from a customer — and that transit time is only a few seconds. So you haven't got trapped cash. You haven't got cash sitting in prefunded buffers somewhere. You don't have trapped cash stuck in the correspondent network. You don't have unproductive buffers that are sitting there just in case. So moving from just-in-case settlement and liquidity to just-in-time is going to be the big shift, because we are removing the brakes. There's no speed consideration anymore, because it's instant and it's global, and there's no rails cost consideration, because it costs a fraction of a cent. And that's incredibly transformative. I'm exaggerating now, but it's something that we're actually working on, and I'm pretty sure we'll get close to it: if you need to settle at 5:00 p.m. European time — so that would be 11:00 a.m. local time in Colombia — to get coffee released from a producer there into a warehouse, and they will only release the coffee once you've settled in the wallet, you can basically take the money out of your productive money market funds, let's say one minute before you need to settle, and it will still arrive there. That means you don't have to maintain buffers there to achieve that. You don't have to have local bank accounts. You don't have to provision for that cash two days beforehand. All that stuff goes away, and the money is always working. So your costs in terms of rails go down, your FX risk goes down, your settlement risk goes down, and any market risk that you might have, for instance on commodities, is extinguished. All your risk mitigation costs, which can be substantial, are gone. There's no cash drag, or very little, because the money is always working. So your return on operating capital increases instantly, and because there's no trapped cash, your working capital capacity increases. And if you're running a business where there's demand for your product, you'll basically increase your top line as well, because you've got more capital to deploy, or you reduce your credit costs. So it's incredibly transformative, and whilst the complexity is abstracted away and it's getting more and more adopted, I think adoption will be incredibly quick, because the competitive advantage it will give to certain types of companies is just incredible — and the competitive disadvantage will very quickly destroy your position in the market, because those cost savings will ultimately be passed on to the clients. You'll see that emergence. So I think it's an absolute imperative that companies start looking at this. And I'm not, as I say, preaching for my own parish — it's exactly why I'm doing this job, exactly why I'm excited. But you should start looking at it, start experimenting with it, because in some settings it can be absolutely transformative.

Jan-Willem: Yeah, looking forward to seeing that evolve. One treasurer asked me a couple of weeks ago: can stablecoins also be used to move money out of countries where it's hard to move money out of? Take Brazil, for example. If you have a company subsidiary in Brazil and they have excess cash that you want to get to the group treasury or the holding, it's quite hard to get money out of that country. Do you see stablecoins playing a role here as well, or is it still blocked by legislation?

Arnoud: Well, I'd hate to think that stablecoins would be used to circumvent the law.

Jan-Willem: Mhm.

Arnoud: I don't think that's a sustainable way to operate, and I don't think it's a sustainable solution. It might help a few times, but ultimately the regulation is there for a purpose, and I think, whether it's cash or stablecoins, it will have the same treatment once the law catches up. At the moment there might be a gray area where stablecoins are seen as commodities rather than funds — so, hey, it doesn't apply — but I think that's a temporary thing. Where I think the opportunity is going to come in is, as I said, liquidity in secondary markets, particularly for the big foreign currencies. So why is it hard to get money out? First of all, to a large extent, companies need that foreign currency for their imports — strategic imports — and because of the lack of access to the correspondent banking network, they rely on exports to actually get that foreign currency in. Now, if you can bypass the need for a correspondent banking network and tap into global liquidity pools of foreign currencies in the form of stablecoins that move around very quickly, then suddenly you've got a way to start moving that money. The liquidity in those order books — for instance, USDT versus Brazilian reais — will start increasing, the spreads will get tighter, and then it becomes a matter of reporting rather than something you can't do. I think that's where we're heading in the short term. There may be some regulatory arbitrage that makes it possible, but I would say that's not a purpose that we would be comfortable with in terms of onboarding a customer, because we want to know the purpose of the money movement, of course, and that's not immediately the one that we would prioritize — let's put it that way.

Jan-Willem: Fully understand. For corporate treasury teams that are looking to get started with stablecoins, maybe in a small, experimental way, what would you advise them to do? Would you advise them to wait and see until stablecoins become a very dominant form of payment, or can they already start doing some little experiments today and then work with a staged approach, in order to get more hands-on experience with this form of payment?

Arnoud: I think if you're going to have stablecoins in your mix eventually — and let's say there's a 100% chance that you eventually will — then you need to understand the operational risks that are associated with that technology and those rules. Even if they're abstracted away, you need to be able to evaluate the solution vendor that abstracts away those risks. I think you need to get your hands dirty a little bit, just to learn what you're dealing with. I sometimes compare it to this — I'm of an age that I remember when Skype was introduced. I was living in New Zealand and my family was in the Netherlands, and we used to use voice-over-IP calling, but it was very cumbersome, very difficult to do, and very painful, and usually it didn't work — it broke down. Especially with my parents, who were getting a bit older then. Now, when Skype came in, suddenly the user experience changed, and I was excited because, hey, I can make this call, and I'm going to do it outside of the telcos. I'm not using the regular fixed line or even the mobile — I'm doing this via the internet, completely free. Amazing, right? But I had experienced the pain; I understood how the new technology worked and what the difference was, and then I was on my way. Now, with stablecoins, I don't think you need to start at a protocol level and figure out how that works. But if you don't have an account with a crypto exchange, I would probably do that, to be honest. Open up an account and understand the complexity of the onboarding. What questions do they ask? That will feel familiar from a bank, so you understand the level of regulation. You can experiment with sending money from your bank account to the crypto exchange, and then suddenly you see a balance appearing with a strange number in front of it, which is your account number, and you can then take that balance and swap it for a stablecoin. Do that a few times. Once you're confident with that, send it to someone on another exchange, or to another wallet with a particular address. I think that experience will give you that Skype feeling of: hey, I can move money and I didn't use a bank for this one. And it gives you some exposure to the complexity of it. The other thing is, I would look at custodians who take away some of the complexity of the operations, so that it becomes more like a banking portal — and look at the user interface. Then I'd start to work with a key customer or key supplier that you're always paying, where it always costs money and there are always calls about where the money is, and say: well, why don't we try this with a stablecoin? And work with a party that can help you take away some of the complexity to make that happen. So those are the steps I would take. And I would seriously look, probably later this year, at tokenized money market funds, tokenized yield instruments, because that in itself is going to be a fantastic revolution.

Jan-Willem: That sounds like an amazing playbook, and I think also quite a low barrier to start with — the different steps don't take that much time to set up, I think.

Arnoud: I think there's an intermediate way as well. This is also where we're looking. Remember I spoke about the various forms of money. E-money is sometimes a very underappreciated money form, given all the excitement about stablecoins. Stablecoins are the shiny new thing, but e-money is actually a very strong solution that requires almost the same things. You need to fund it from a bank account. You see the balance appearing. The balance is suddenly not with a bank, but with something that looks like a bank yet is not a bank, and you move money around. So that's another way to take an even more careful step, and then from there start moving to stablecoins. There are multiple ways, but I think getting your hands dirty, one way or another, is probably the place to start.

Jan-Willem: Final question, Arnoud. What is perhaps the most controversial or against-the-norm idea about the stablecoin space that you want to give us as a takeaway?

Arnoud: I think stablecoins are getting a level of press that reminds me of the early blockchain days, where it's like a hammer looking for a nail. It's not a solution for everything, and despite all the hype — some of it justified — it's not necessarily the right solution for everyone. I think a careful evaluation of what you're trying to achieve is needed before you embark on it, because it could just be a shiny thing that doesn't add any value. So yeah, I'm probably not saying something that is appreciated by all my peers in the stablecoin industry, but that's the way I see it. The reality is that I don't think anybody really wants a stablecoin. A stablecoin is not a business model in itself — there's only one company for which it's a business model, and that's Tether — and the rest need to find ways to make it a solution. If I look at companies that we work with, they want to figure out how to solve that treasury devil's trilemma. For instance, they just want to get paid faster, at lower cost — that's it — and there are other ways to achieve that than a stablecoin. So don't confuse the goal with the solution. Sometimes the solution is presented as the goal, but it's not. At some point we shouldn't even be talking about stablecoins anymore — it should just be a means to an end.

Well, look at it this way. Visually or conceptually, you're sitting behind a terminal and you say: "I need to pay Jan-Willem and I want him to be paid at 5:00 p.m." You do that in the morning at 9:00. That's it. That's all you should have to do. And then there's an optimization that happens, probably with AI, that says: "Oh, Jan-Willem, he's based in the Netherlands. I'm in Malaysia. So how am I going to do that?" And because of the predictability of blockchains, you know how fast it will settle. You know that it's only going to need four seconds before it's in your wallet with finality. It's going to take the machine one minute to get it out of a tokenized money market fund — that's to be safe. So if I give an instruction to pay you at 5:00 p.m., then two minutes before 5:00, the machine will take the money out of the money market fund, send it your way, and you get paid. That's the only thing you should know. You should not have to deal with wallets, which stablecoin, which blockchain, all those things. That should be for the machine to figure out.

Jan-Willem: Well, amazing, Arnoud. Thank you for sharing all these insights. I think it offers a lot of value for corporate treasurers. Thank you, and looking forward to talking to you again.

Arnoud: Likewise.